thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
How to get CRM for small businesses right

How to get CRM for small businesses right

There is one scary fact in the CRM world. Out of roughly 25 million businesses, only 1 percent has a CRM system. Imagine this! It is a huge waste on one side and a tremendous opportunity on the other side. If vendors find the way into the future of CRM. Nimble seems to have found a way. The CRMKonvos team discussed these and other challenges of CRM systems with Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. We are following his path for quite some time now, how he built Nimble from very small beginnings and always with the thought of enriching an ecosystem with his solution that is formed around simplicity and making life easier not only for the salesreps but for other employees, too. Learn how a philosophy of giving and sharing enables own growth by helping others to grow – from someone who achieved this repeatedly. And yes, Jon also knows why social selling and social CRM are not things anymore – if they have ever been. Jon is a true role model. Learn from him how to scale while being yourself, thinking...
Great CX from an Oracle point of view

Great CX from an Oracle point of view

The CRMKonvos team started into the new year talking with Daniel Renggli, Director Field Marketing North at Oracle. As we all know, Oracle has a vast range of solutions across the whole value chain and is one of the few that can (almost) support a whole enterprise with its solution. Oracle was also known as a cloud laggard – a notion that got vastly changed in the last few years. And Oracle governs the complete hardware and software stack to support businesses, which again is rare in the enterprise applications world. The company’s IaaS infrastructure even can extend into the customer data center, which is a very interesting offering. Last, but not least, Oracle has a strong set of CRM- and CX applications, on premise and in the cloud, with the cloud software being established in the market in the past years. Oracle is one of the contenders in the #ClashOfTitans. All the more reason to talk with an Oracle representative about what is great CX and how to get there. Being confronted with the complete CRMKonvos gang, Daniel took his stand. And he did well. We learned a lot. You can, too. Here is the recording of the conversation. It is worthwhile the time. Trust...
Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation – A Stake in the Ground

Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation – A Stake in the Ground

Since about February or March of Anno Domini 2020 we regularly hear about how the Covid crisis is driving “digital transformation”. You now might ask yourself why I put this term into quotes. Bear with me for a minute, it’ll be explained … For sure, this crisis is forcing many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. It also forced some companies to at least temporarily close physical doors as supply chains and/or delivery of products and services are severely inhibited or even broken. We also see a lot of companies implement interesting hybrid strategies that bring what we thought of being decidedly offline experiences into the online world. A good example for this trend are wineries that lost an important lead generation and sales channel with their temporary inability to host wine tastings in their cellars. Till now the opinion was that nothing can beat the experience of being down there in a wine cellar, surrounded by barrels of ageing wine, musty air, like-minded people and a connoisseur that explains the wines, their provenance and their characteristics. Still, some of them have transformed the experience they deliver during wine tastings into a combination of offline and online experience. Wine gets selected by the customers, an appointment for the tasting is made, and the wine is wrapped into some nice packaging, along with some information, and sent to the customer. The tasting itself then is supported by platforms such as Virtual Wine Tasting, Tasting Room, or Cheerswithme. The experience might not be the same as at the winery, and it shouldn’t. Instead, it offers something that a...
How to add more Punk to CX

How to add more Punk to CX

With our guest Adrian Swinscoe the CRMKonvos team walked the line between Punk and CX, discuss what they have in common. Adrian is the author of Punk CX, a book that he is not ashamed to admit was conceived after having a drink or two. Punk is a reaction to the attempt at perfection and an obsession towards technical skill that are a hallmark of Prog Rock. Prog Rock simply appeared overblown. Punk, in contrast, is not about perfection. Instead it is about doing, getting started, with corners and edges. In this sense, Adrian is a punk of CX, and his book is absolutely readable, with quite some food for thought. It is DiY style, just as punk is. But how does this apply to CX? Find out punk style. Watch this great CRMKonvos episode. Of course, we didn’t just stick to this but also looked into what are similarities and differences between CX in the US and Europe, and so much more, including the future and microphone...
Salesforce, Slack, Facebook, Kustomer – the big epiphany

Salesforce, Slack, Facebook, Kustomer – the big epiphany

In the last few days two really interesting acquisitions caught my eye. The obvious one that hardly could be missed, is Slack being acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $27.7 bn, which, to put it into perspective, is $2.2 bn more than Salesforce forecasts as its revenue for the upcoming fiscal year. The other interesting acquisition is social network behemoth Facebook plucking up Kustomer, a five-year-old company with origins in customer service. What is interesting about Kustomer is that the company promotes managing customer service from the customer (hence the name) angle and not coming from the ticket as the main entity. Kustomer has since positioned itself more into the CRM area, but still with a focus on service “CRM for customer service” and also implemented an AI to help with routing and the end-to-end handling of (simple) cases by chat bots. Digging a little further, one can find that Snapchat also recently acquired voca.ai, another tech company that specializes in serving natural, human-like conversations. Salesforce acquires Slack I have already covered the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, and so have many other analysts. Thinking a little longer about it, yes, Slack gives Salesforce capabilities that so far only Microsoft can offer, albeit the balance of Salesforce’s productivity suite (acquired with Quip) is no match for Microsoft Office. Using both, MS Teams and Slack, I think that, with all its deficiencies, MS Teams has functional advantages over Slack. And it comes as part of MS 365 (formerly known as MS Office). On the other hand, Slack as part of Salesforce is giving Salesforce customers that are not yet committed...